Building bridges over troubled waters in Ferguson, elsewhere

A small group of protesters marches down West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Mo. on Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2014. On Aug. 9, 2014, a white police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year old, in the St. Louis suburb. ... more >

There’s simply no way to know now what the end game will be in Ferguson, Missouri.

But there’s certainly plenty of issues worthy of considerable thought.

“We’ve got to build a bridge,” so said Karl Racine, a former defense lawyer and White House associate counsel, when I asked on Thursday how he would handle the Ferguson problem. “You have to be in the room with the district attorney, you have to be in the room with the U.S. attorney and you have to be in the room with the police department.”

With so much still up in the air and no bridge, everyone is left to speculate.

They can speculate how they and others will react after Michael Brown is buried, about what charges, if any, will be brought against Officer Darren Wilson, about the fate of scores of people arrested since Mr. Brown’s Aug. 9 death, about what direction race relations will take and what the heretofore chain of command will be when similar law enforcement incidences arise.

For sure, the Brown aftermath proved that no one was in charge in Ferguson and no one was in charge of Ferguson. Not only was there no bridge, but the mayor, James Knowles III, was so perplexed about the turn of events he went out and hired two PR firms, purportedly one black and one white. A nod, perhaps, to affirmative action.

Or was the mayor simply ignoring that there is a racial divide in “his” city of 22,000?

Did his PR gurus explain why “his” city was calm during the day, but turned into a house afire at night?

Did the white firm or the black firm, for that matter, explain why the feds, the governor, the city and the St. Louis County authorities weren’t given a second thought by the malcontents.

President Obama certainly has, as have Eric Holder and, in a roundabout way, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon. The actions of the two chief executives and the attorney general delivered far different snapshots and messages than those, as a political example, sent by President Kennedy, his attorney general-brother, Bobby, and Ross Barnett, then-governor of Mississippi. All three were Democrats, yet their protracted disagreement over integrating the University of Mississippi and the hardline of other adamant segregationists led to what’s deemed the Ole Miss riot of 1962 and the Kennedys’ call for federal troops, including the Border Patrol, to calm things down.

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About the Author

Award-winning opinion writer Deborah Simmons is a senior correspondent who reports on City Hall and writes about education, culture, sports and family-related topics. Mrs. Simmons has worked at several newspapers, and since joining The Washington Times in 1985, has served as editorial-page editor and features editor and on the metro desk. She has taught copy editing at the University of ...